Week 195: On the Recruiting Trail Again
MMM...Donuts
[Just to give you an idea of what's coming up, I have written things for this week and next week and the week after that about the preparation period for the televised match. I plan to release a simulcast version of the episode from my viewpoint on the day that the episode airs, and so that you can watch along on the KD Quiz website.]
Because of the next few columns being written out of order, this was written one week after taping. As a frame for what is going on, we started a message in the schools morning announcements beginning on the 28th, ahead of the taping. The message switched over on the 30th to give students information about our next practice after the taping, so the December 5th practice was intended to reflect on what happened, and use the event of taping as a recruiting tool. We also played our finest recruiting card in this meeting: two dozen donuts.
I followed my list of best principles for dealing with players in practice without experience. I think that's one of the few guides I'm happy with and continue to be happy with. A lot of the situations I wrote about in this guide didn't show up, and I can attribute that to using a set in practice that had better answer line control than I am used to getting from a random draw. I used a 2022 high school novice set, and I knew from using it previously to recruit that it would do the job.
As an aside, I'd just like to put in another plea here for more novice event availability. While the new students looked at the students with one year's experience like they were hardened veterans, neither group is anywhere near the experience level necessary to get to nationals. And because this recruiting took place in December, it's a long time to the next novice tournament. The optimal time for a school to recruit new players who could benefit from a novice tournament is almost evenly distributed across the calendar from the opening of the school year to the first nationals.
The basic performance phase of the opening meeting as the digest their donuts is simple, answer the questions of:
Why is it interesting? Showing them game play, and showing them people enjoying playing the game.
Who does quiz bowl? Appealing to the students who use Jeopardy! as a benchmark, but we're also at the point where there are people you should know in a variety of fields who played quiz bowl in school and those people are using those skills in their fields.
Why does it help in your studies? This is the appeal which Greg Bossick called "independent study in everything." But I also have a guide which Craig Barker and I worked on about the soft skills which quiz bowl develops. I only went with a couple of points on this, mostly you learn to make better decisions on limited information, and you learn to think quicker and listen deeper.
Why are we a team? I've used promotional posters on the tagline of "Everybody knows something" and I often pair that with "Nobody knows everything, so that's why we're a team.""
Where are we going when we play? Travel matters as a hook, and that I can show travel is still possible even when the most prominent public destination, the TV studio, is no longer there.
Who will we see when we get there? Sometimes it's important to know your rival schools are there to be beaten.
What's the benefit? This one I got to add because I had tangible things to show from the program here.
And then after we had laid those hooks in, we practiced.
We broadened out the team, we're now at six girls and one boy, and now we have representation from all grades of the school. Assuming we keep everybody, that's enough for a B team at circuit events. And more importantly that means we've got representation of higher level math and science on the team, four different years of reading lists and curricula, and some active recruiting potential during the runup to the airdate and after it. Everyone recruited prior to this was one degree of separation from Catie, she knew them through class or an activity, and was in some way involved in getting them to their first practice. That changed with this round of public recruiting, probably because we have a better story to tell.
I also got a first, one of the students was already familiar with quiz bowl from another activity, in this case Academic Games. I had mentioned that Academic Games has a pocket of strong support northwest of Pittsburgh, and that Beaver County (one of those supportive areas) is going to have a quiz bowl event staffed by the coaches of Academic Games. I had not been aware that Seton's AGLOA team was active since COVID, but the coach a senior social studies teacher, has gotten them active again this year. This will be interesting cross-pollination, as I know we can probably give their team mastery of at least one competition in the Academic Games portfolio (Presidents) and give them study guides for some of their other competitions. Their regionals has ended already so there may be an opportunity for more interaction between the two teams in the next semester.
When you're recruiting you want to follow up any significant event with publicity. In this case because there's a taping date, and an airing date, we have two significant points to push. Taping gives you something you can push on internal school channels, while the airing gives you a reason to push on social media channels outside the school, targeting parents and alumni who could influence students to join. We're setting up this pattern, pictures are going on the monitors in school, while we're queued up to note the taping on the school's instagram and facebook pages on the week before December 23, and for the rebroadcast in the week between Christmas and New Year's. That makes that first practice of the new year important to recruit again, because that is the point of maximum exposure to the population.
Upon reflection we ended up one dozen donuts too many, but we will successfully bribe the teachers to our cause tomorrow.
Next week, we'll discuss the things done in the last 48 hours before the tournament. I actually used what I've written about doing a five-day preparation to cover yourself for your final actions. I did a pre-mortem, and used that to plan the team's endgame moves. I created a simulated round to match an episode as closely as possible, and put the team through that. And then something happened in the last practice that flipped the entire script.